Top Ten Reasons Clean Coal is Dirty

#1: "Clean" Coal Kills People

The American Lung Association and the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) claims that 13,000 people die each year from coal pollution--down from 24,000 in 2004, when less pollution regulation was enforced. In addition to the premature deaths, CATF estimates that every year coal pollution is responsible for 12,000 emergency room visits, 20,000 heart attacks, and over 200,000 asthma attacks.

If you listen to the coal industry, you may get the impression that they are the only energy companies capable of putting people to work. In reality, investments in renewable energy or energy efficiency have been shown to create far more jobs than equal investments in fossil fuel industries (see Green For All citing UC Berkeley, SolarLove citing U-Mass at Amherst, Citizen's Climate Lobby references).

Ironically, while the coal industry and coal-state politicians have accused the Obama administration of waging a "war on coal," coal mining jobs have increased under the Obama Administration as compared to the George W. Bush administration.

Rather than acknowledge how Americans already are paying these external costs of coal with their own deteriorated health, the coal industry cries foul whenever the government takes even the smallest steps to curb pollution and its deadly impact on the public. Whenever efforts are made to internalize these costs and reduce coal's health impact on people, the coal industry passes higher electricity costs onto its customers and paints protective regulations as if they were new, sudden costs, rather than acknowledging how ignoring coal's toll on human health has been a massive informal subsidy for the industry for well over a Century.

In contrast, coal mining and coal-burning utility industries spend millions of dollars on political contributions and millions more on lobbying the federal government to keep regulations at bay that would result in less coal pollution.

According to the groundbreaking, peer-reviewed "Carbon Majors" study, tracing all historic greenhouse gas emissions back to specific companies and entities, the coal industries of the world own 51% of global greenhouse gas emissions from 1854-2010 (PDF p.235)

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates of over 29,000 cases of mesothelioma and 26,000 cases of Black Lung from 2000-2010.

Rather than care for suffering workers, the coal industry has hired lawyers and doctors to deny Black Lung disease, rather than protecting its workforce and paying for the treatment they need. According to a Center for Public Integrity investigation honored the Pulitzer Prize, coal's white collar crime defense firms like Jackson Kelly have been caught suppressing evidence of Black Lung to prevent companies from appropriately compensating sick miners, even after decades of famously-strenusous physical labor for those companies and the profit their work provides for wealthy coal executives, lawyers and lobbyists.

Coal companies are increasingly using this method because it allows for almost complete recovery of coal seams while reducing the number of workers required to a fraction of what conventional methods require.

Mountaintop removal involves clear cutting native hardwood forests, using dynamite to blast away as much as 800-1000 feet of mountaintop, and then dumping the waste into nearby valleys, often burying streams.

#10: "Clean" Coal Costs Billions in Taxpayer Subsidies

The U.S. government continues to aggressively fund coal-related projects despite all that is known about coal’s impacts on health, climate and the economy.